Water Water

If you subscribe to an online news service, you’re used to
getting notifications about news stories the algorithm thinks
might impact you. In Southeast Louisiana, you’ll pretty
regularly see variations on the headline, “Sea Level Rise
Threatens Coastline” or “Louisiana Loses a Football Field of
Wetlands Per Hour.”


If you’re like most people, you keep scrolling. Or, maybe you
read the article, shake your head at the dire situation, but
shrug it off because, well, what can you do? 


The reason you can afford to take a laissez faire attitude toward
our disappearing coastline and wetlands, is because there are
people who don’t. There are people working every day, here
in Baton Rouge, to preserve our piece of Planet Earth.


Darius Bonton is the founder, owner and principal of Bonton
Associates.


Bonton Associates are an engineering company focused on designing
and implementing infrastructure and transportation systems that
allows us to build what needs to be built, and get where we need
to go, without destroying the environment in the process.


To the contrary, Bonton is all about delivering solutions to
water and transportation issues that do more than just comply
with environmental regulations, they actually improve our
existing way of life.


If you’re looking for an organization whose name doesn’t pull any
punches, how about the Coalition To Restore Coastal Louisiana.


“The Coalition” the title refers to is a wide range of
organizations and people who partner to do an even wider range of
activities to save our coast - from planting grasses in
marshlands to giving expert advice to local, state and federal
organizations.


The Coalition is Louisiana’s first statewide nonprofit
organization dedicated to coastal restoration. They started out
in 1988, and since March 2024 Ethan Melancon has been their
Advocacy Director.


In 1789 the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge published a poem called
The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. You might not be familiar with
the poem, but you probably know a line or two from it. Namely,
“water water everywhere / Nor any drop to drink.”


The poem is about a sailor stranded at sea, ironically, dying
from dehydration while being surrounded by water. The theme of
the poem is nature’s indifference to human suffering.


Whether or not nature is indifferent to us, we humans continue to
do our best to adapt to the elements, and even downright defy
them.


We owe our very existence in Southeast, and Southwest, Louisiana
to past generations’ willingness to drain swamps, build levees,
and bounce back from hurricanes.


In our current generations, it’s the work of companies like
Bonton Associates and organizations like Coalition to Restore
Coastal Louisiana who are continuing to organize, design and
execute strategies for containing the power of nature that allow
us to remain here, and hopefully will for generations to come.


Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs On the
Boulevard. Jim Engster sits in as host for Stephanie Riegel. More
info about Out to Lunch Baton Rouge is at itsbatonrouge.la.


See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.